Claire - I resonated a lot with your description. As an immunologist myself I would love to work with you on your vision. I would highly reccomend your checking out "I, microbiologist" (ASM press). It sounds like the micro equivalent of what you are trying to produce. That is a direction I would like to go with my immunology class as well!

Natalia - A solution to your first sub-problem for you would be to implement exam wrappers. We rolled these out in our freshman biology course last year. It shifted the "ownership" of grades more solidly to the students and highlighted many of the gaps where their study skills/knowledge had been subpar. Your second sub-aim is also my main issue... I look forward to some good conversations amongst our group!

Dear Claire
I resonated a lot with your interest of how students perceive research and also your concern about the methods that are used for these kinds of studies. I found that coursera will be offering a free course in qualitative methods in October and I am already planning to take it. Maybe it will also be useful for you?
https://www.coursera.org/course/qualitativemethods

Hello all, I uploaded 3 IRB documents, the official IRB policies of my institution and examples of 2 IRB submissions (one for a flipped classroom project I am participating currently, and the other for analysis of exisiting data)- hope it is ok. When I started with IRB applications it was helpful to see other people's examples.

Hi David and Natalia, thank you for your comments on my last assignment. I've never done a MOOC, but would consider giving it a try if others are going to do it as well! I was relieved to see that we all seem a bit nervous but excited about this journey. I look forward to hearing more about all your projects.

Ana Maria - it's a small world, turns out you know my colleague Samantha Gruenheid from the Small World Initiative. I worked with her to implement it at McGill, including putting together an IRB for the project.

The IRB process at McGill was hard to understand at first, but I've gone through it so it's clear to me now. I think the reason I found it confusing initially is because the instructions are spread out all over the place, there is no one document that explains it coherently. At the time I spoke to some people who had done it and was lucky to have colleagues willing to share copies of their successful applications to use as a model. I pasted a bunch of documents into a word file and uploaded a separate pdf with instructions for the expedited review process I used in the past.

Hi everyone, hope your summer is going well. Claire, nice to know about the Smantha connection! I have interfaced with her often via teleconference, but never met in person.Thanks for shariong the documents.
As for my "problem," in the beginning I was not clear which project would be my main topic, but I have decided will be going for the flipping of a majors GenBio class. This is something I have been working with a colleague already so we have some preliminary data. Looking forward meeting you soon and getting tons of feedback (and grilling) :)